The review presents a selection of 30 works by artists who have exhibited at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, from Paul Jenkins to Sam Francis, from James Brooks to Norman Bluhm, from Michael Goldberg to Fritz Bultman, as well as those of other important exponents of the 'American Abstract Expressionism such as John Ferren, John Grillo and Conrad Marca-Relli, and the sculptures of Beverly Pepper.
The exhibition, curated by Mauro Stefanini, revolves around the personality of Martha Jackson who, with her New York gallery, wrote an important chapter in the history of American contemporary art, in particular that of Abstract Expressionism.
In fact, the exhibition offers 30 works by authors such as Paul Jenkins, Sam Francis, James Brooks, Norman Bluhm, Fritz Bultman and Michael Goldberg, by other exponents of American Abstract Expressionism, such as John Ferren, John Grillo and Conrad Marca-Relli and by Beverly Pepper, one of the most recognized protagonists, together with Louise Nevelson, of contemporary American female sculpture.
Made in America will lead the visitor to the electrifying atmosphere of New York in the middle of the last century. It is here that artists, from Moholy-Nagy to Gropius, from Josef Albers to Piet Mondrian, fleeing the totalitarianisms that developed in Europe starting in the 1913s. The New Frontier indicated by the epochal exhibition of the Armory Show in XNUMX, already crossed by Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalì, now presents itself as the great theater in which the experiences of artistic modernism can find worldwide attention and resonance.
In 1942 Peggy Guggenheim opened the Art of This Century museum-gallery; Leo Krausz (Leo Castelli), after the Parisian collaborations alongside René Drouin, is engaged in the search for young talents who flock to the "Big Apple" and, in 1957, opens his gallery.
The "New York school" was blossoming tumultuous at the end of the forties, bringing together the lovers of the pictorial sign and gesture - the action painters - and those who instead preferred large fields of color - the color field painters. In 1950, the irascible – as the Herald Tribune disparagingly calls them – lively contested the exhibition project presented by the Metropolitan Museum. Among them, together with Barnett Newman, are Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, James Brooks, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Conrad Marca-Relli, Clifford Still, Arshile Gorky: the heart of that Abstract Expressionism which is seeking an original balance between the vigor of the sign and the "sublime", between abstraction and inner vision.
And in 1953 Martha Jackson, originally from Buffalo, opened her gallery in New York which, in a decade, would gather first-rate artists around her: from Jim Dine to Sam Francis, from Adolph Gottlieb to Willem De Kooning, from Claes Oldenburg to Christo, from Paul Jenkins to Norman Bluhm, from James Brooks to Hans Hofmann.
If, as she herself states, "the role of a gallery owner is to act as a mediator between the artist and society", it is not surprising that she pays attention to one of the most radical and irreverent artistic experiences such as the one towards the group Gutai Japanese.
